Tag: God

Our God is a resurrection God. We believe in the resurrection of Jesus so we need to believe in the resurrection of our world, our country our people.

Dont waste this time praying for what you had, pray for what you want your future to hold.

What has this time of fear, trouble, disease taught you?

What have you learned about yourself?

Are you going back into a job that you love, will you go back with renewed vigour? Will you look for a job that will fulfil you more?

When your children go back to school, will they go back with a more intense desire to learn, will you as their parents understand their way of learning better, be better advocates for them with a renewed understanding.

Have you learned of what you really need to survive? What is truly valuable in your life or maybe more importantly who is valued.

Will you understand yourself more, cherish your time more?

So often in life we forget that we live with the gift of resurrection. That we have the promise of more. So many right now will be heartbroken and believe me when I tell you I understand the pain of lost so deeply, so raw as if it was yesterday but I hold on to the promise of forever, the promise of our every tear being cherished.

May we come through this awful time and strive to live with more clarity, more truth, more time, more love and more hope.

With Christmas a day away I have been thinking a lot about family and in particular the joy I get from being a mother.

17 and a half years ago I began the journey of motherhood and not for one second have i regretted it. From the moment my children were planned they were loved. From the moment they were conceived they were cherished.

Being a parent isn’t easy. I have made mistakes and I have struggled but my girls were and are the greatest gifts ever.

I look at my children now and they are nearly grown and it scares me. Next year my eldest will leave for university and my heart is fearful.

How do you let them go?

From the moment I saw that second blue line I have done all that I can to protect my beautiful girls. I feel I failed when Livvy died. I couldn’t protect her from Rett Syndrome.

Now I’m scared I will not be able to protect my girls from the world.

How do you let them go?

How do you find the courage to loosen the ties and give them the freedom they need to grow.

I guess this is where it comes down to trust.

Trust that you have raised them to be wise and keep themselves safe.

Trust in them.

It’s not easy and I think now of Mary and that moment when God asked her to carry Jesus.

Now I knew I was going to have a good night as I love volunteering with Compassion but I never expected to be completely blown away by some amazing music and fantastic worship.

The evening started with the artist Ben Cantelon to be honest I knew off him a little but hadn’t really heard much of his music but I have to say he was pretty incredible. He stirred up your heart in a way that you could sense the of the whole atmosphere of the church change.

Then Rend Collective took to the stage and WOW the place just lit up. Never have I seen such energy in a performance, in the music.

There was no fancy lights, no big instruments it was raw incredible talent being shown all to bring glory to God.

Their music was so fresh that I was just blown away.

“Rend Collective Experiment is an eclectic collective of multi-instrumentalists from the North of Ireland. An inherent desire for something spiritually substantive in our increasingly artificial world is exactly what brought the movement of friends together. United by a common purpose, these twenty-somethings began exploring the intersection between God, life and community.”

The night was the final one of their Campfire tour and my goodness they were incredible. Yes I am gushing as they simply gave me an incredible high and called me closer to God than I have been in a while.

Yet it wasn’t just the music that stirred my heart as the members of the band spoke about the need for us to remove ourselves from the artificial and connect with the real. That to be the church that Jesus calls us to be doesn’t just require us just to attend a building every Sunday but to live as the light.

So many of us attend our weekly service and thats great, but we should never leave church the way we came in.

I needed to hear these words, I needed so badly to feel this worship. I’m not having a crisis of faith just feeling lost about church.

Worship doesn’t have to happen in a church on a sunday, we can worship God in our homes, in our schools, in our play, around a campfire.

Faith isn’t a thinking its a doing.

If you have never heard of Rend Collective I cannot urge you enough to go check them out and Ben Cantelon too.

Their music is different, their music is raw, their music is soul refreshing.